


Combat Boots

by kuonji



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Backstory, Character Development, Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-22
Updated: 2011-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-24 20:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuonji/pseuds/kuonji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Your mother wears combat boots." This had been delivered in perfect English, which shock from was the only thing that prevented a younger Elizabeth Weir from breaking up laughing.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Combat Boots

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative Links:  
> <http://kuonji14.livejournal.com/14475.html>

"Your mother wears combat boots."

This had been delivered in perfect English, which shock from was the only thing that prevented a younger Elizabeth Weir from breaking up laughing. God knew which horrible export film the boorish man had picked up that charming phrase from.

"Hiking boots, actually," she had replied, because she had been more fearless in her youth, and the minister's status and patriarchical society had not intimidated her. The translator had hesitated, but Elizabeth had given him a flat stare -- Weir's company was paying him the equivalent of his usual weekly salary each day, for God's sake -- and he dutifully translated the retort.

It was lucky for Elizabeth's career that that particular trade deal had been doomed even before she stepped in. On the other hand, the incident was what had kicked off her decision to leave the corporate arena for the political one, so she thought back on it in later years with appreciative warmth.

***

Teenage Lizzie had been a bit of a closet hippy, in fashion if not in ideology. Indeed, she had always supported her troops and cried at the strains of the National Anthem. She had sneered at the Beatles and at reading Harper Lee in junior high -- attention-seeking melodramatics -- and turned up her nose at their drugged clueless followers.

In secret, though, she had been in love with the floaty tops and the colorful skirts of the age, and she adored the leather sandals that laced up, criss-crossing and graceful, to mid-calf, like a Greek goddess. Even after -- _especially_ after -- her college years, vocal and eye-opening as she had discovered a different world of people who talked back to her, she longed to try on a pair.

***

Elizabeth had been somewhat gangly in youth, never quite filling out her delicate but large-boned hands and feet. Her mother had always told her she had inherited her pretty eyes, though, and now that she is a woman, she's been known to be called 'beautiful'.

Her beauty is something that she disdains to use, but she would be a fool to ignore it.

She used to wear high heels, because that was expected, and because she felt she needed the advantage of height. She soon discovered, however, that tall women and smart women are viewed with equal suspicion. And while she can hardly perform below intelligence, she does choose to begin wearing low-heeled shoes to work. Elizabeth prefers to be underestimated.

***

When she moved out of Simon's house, she had not taken any of her mothballed and plastic-wrapped shoes with her. What was the point, after all? She had gotten along for a year without them, and the SGC lockers hardly had room for bulky unnecessities. She threw away the glittery dance shoes and the smart sandals, and she decided, vehemently, to bequeath her entire collection of ugly pumps and pinching heels to Simon's new floozy.

She wondered if she were allowed to think words like 'floozy' about a woman she had never met. Then she decided that she could think damn well whatever she pleased.

***

Elizabeth is not a particularly athletic person. She keeps her figure, and she had used to take the occasional hike with her mother through the less exotic trails of backwater Virginia. Once she joins the SGC, she finds herself middling between the scientists and the military in terms of physicals.

The boots aren't anything she ever imagined herself getting used to. In truth, she had been at best neutral towards them all the way until Antarctica. Large and thick, they lack the finesse she is used to. She thinks that they were clearly designed for brutish, forceful things that Dr. Elizabeth Weir could never possibly want or need.

By the time she gets to spending beginning to end of each long Atlantean day in them, though, they start to feel natural to her. She realizes that she's gone places, done things, given orders in these rugged off-black shoes that she can't imagine having done in a pair of cool Anne Kleins.

It's at first a little horrifying. Now...

Now every morning she laces up her U.S. military-issue boots, back and forth criss-crossing up past her ankles. They fit snug and roll comfortably under her arches. They carry her with reassuring solidarity down the shining halls and stairs of this beautiful city as well as they carry her gate teams through their more dangerous locales. She knows that they will last at least a decade of normal wear, easy.

And Elizabeth smiles to think that everyone in Atlantis wears the same.

It's silly, so silly, she knows. She's such an unbearable _girl_ for noticing everyone's footwear. But there's an indefinable comfort that at the bottoms of all the yellow and green and red, black, blue in this city, everyone and their mother is wearing combat boots.

  
END.


End file.
